Samuel Beckett: radio head

In one of his many bursts of formally specific creativity, Samuel Beckett explored the medium of radio from 1956 to 1963, creating five original works, one adaptation and two roughs. He wrote, in a letter to Nancy Cunard, that a "gruesome idea" had come to him "in the dead of t'other night", an idea that became All That Fall.

He approached these scripts with as much precision as he did his plays, seeking through the printed word to communicate with the directors, actors and technicians who would bring the words to life, so that they might, through a mass medium, pass on this auditory hallucination to others.

There are two moments at which I tend to picture Beckett with his ear pressed to the wireless. The first is at the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, when I can imagine him in Paris, trying to get the news from the BBC. There is more biographical justification for the second occasion, during the broadcast of All That Fall in 1957, when it seems that bad weather across the Channel gave him only vague impressions of his play, with long passages of static.

This is a potent reminder of how challenging it has been in the past just to listen to the radio. The presence of any apparatus at all is easy to forget in the contemporary era, when “wireless” is more often used to refer to the internet, which we think of as the newer, stronger and younger mass medium.

It is also helpful to remember that “fidelity”, much discussed by Beckett scholars in relation to how closely one adheres to Beckett’s wishes for performance, has an additional, concrete meaning for the radio drama: can I hear it?

Now that we are beyond the era of crystal sets, vacuum tubes and ham enthusiasts, those who seek company have millions of hours and hundreds of languages to choose from, and they can take these sounds with them while walking, cycling, driving, cooking or cleaning. Countless identities, narratives and thoughts, compressed into tiny files, have passed fully into the control of the listener.

Last year 40 million people downloaded the Serial podcast, and last month many millions cursed aloud on hearing that the format would change from once a week to once a fortnight. After a short interregnum in which, at various book clubs, it was considered cheating to listen to an audiobook instead of reading the original, the oral dimension of human narrative has been reinvigorated. From its origin as a kind of miraculous, tenuous link to voices and bodies elsewhere, radio now forms only one part of the ubiquitous and continuous background noise that marks contemporary life.

It is within this auditory context that Pan Pan's presentation of All That Fall on stage, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in February, after years of international touring, finds its form and its significance.

Listening is again turned into an active and sensory occasion, and a specific chamber for the experience is designed that marks it out as distinct from the bombardment of sound everywhere else in the world. It is a throwback both to an era when families tuned in together and, still further back, to the preradio era of the seanchaí and the filí, when the oral tradition made the event of a story more important than the physical object of the book.

A radio script, like that for any play, is a blueprint for an event. The playwright, now broadcasting from a more distant station, has left it as a clue. But it is the event that counts.

Nicholas Johnson is an assistant professor of drama at Trinity College Dublin and codirector of the annual Samuel Beckett Summer School. All That Fall is at the Abbey from February 11th to 20th